Actor: A person who might to be shopping for a personality, but appears to be trying everything on first.
Artist: A person with two jobs, one calling, and no career.
Artistic Integrity: A phrase commonly used when discussing creative works intended to appeal to their authors rather than their audiences.
Astronomy: A field of study whose adherents endeavor to deduce the nature of our world by observing the objects furthest from it.
Attorney-Client Privilege: The sacred bond of trust that exists between a slimy scumbag of a lawyer and his scumbag criminal of a client.
Avocation: That which makes breathing worth the trouble.
Awkward: An adjective which denotes the inability to decide whether something is humorous or regrettable.
Baseball: In the eyes of someone who truly knows the game, baseball is a lifelong passion that produces pleasure and pain, inspires prose and poetry, demands art and drudgery, encompasses alchemy and science, and even informs life and death. In the eyes of someone indifferent, baseball is a child's pastime, chiefly concerning the act of hitting a piece of horsehide with a stick.
Biology: The study of how dead things lived.
Birth: The preliminary stage of death.
Blogger: A person secure in his or her opinion who has yet to secure the interest of a publisher.
Book: An archaic precursor to the computer.
Butter: Oil + Indecision
Cancer: A family of over 200 unique diseases. Collectively, cancers can cause almost any imaginable symptom and be linked to almost any imaginable cause. It is safe to assume that anything that is worth doing, and much that isn't, causes cancer.
Cellular Phone: An Elderitch Abomination. A reflection of all of the most horrible aspects of human nature, culture, and behavior, from mindless suggestibility to hive social structure to participation in fashion trends.
Cleaning: A custom of spending thousands of hours on labors which are often unnecessary, usually for the sake of appearances, and inevitably undone shortly following their completion, only to be redone. Though the more mainstream translations are quite misleading on this point, it has recently come to light that cleaning was the true punishment of Sisiphys, who was appointed as the underworld's janitor.
Conformity: A social convenience achieved at great personal inconvenience.
Cognitive Dissonance: The presence of irony in one's personality. Also, a possible explanation for hipsters.
Consensus: That which is not preferred by anyone, and thus accepted by everyone.
Conventional Wisdom: That which is believed to be true because it is believed to be true.
Crass: The way Donald Trump talks about women.
Critic: One who can neither do, nor teach.
Culture: An invisible fence composed of unspoken rules and created without consideration, by mass consensus.
Doctor: An instrument of profit employed by insurance companies.
Dog: An animal that seeks to make a vice of humanity's rarest virtues.
Downshifty: A person who merely seems to be following you is shifty, but when you slow down, and they slow down to match your speed or ensure a "coincidental" meeting, then they are downshifty.
Dust: The editor of this dictionary has the good sense to consider this word a noun only, and not a verb.
Eccentricity: The ability to do the regular, unusually.
English: A language with at least nineteen different words for "rain," invented by the British. It's still better than their food.
etc.: Short for the Latin "et cetera," this concise and convenient abbreviation serves to express that my desire to appear educated outstrips my willingness to fully educate myself.
Executive: A false prophet, gifted with "executive vision." Executives have visions, and then everyone else has nightmares.
Experience: Something acquired largely because we didn't have it when we really needed it.
Expletive: A word that can mean anything and be used anywhere, thus rendering it useless and meaningless.
Eye: An instrument of self-deception, second only to the brain.
Facebook: Twitter with leather seats and heated cupholders.
Fashion: A complex system of cultural prejudices codified by second-rate artists doing jobs for which fourth-rate engineers would be better suited. Western fashion appears to have been organized around the philosophical values of impracticality and discomfort, though it would require study by a native of an uncontacted tribal culture to be certain.
Fatigue(s): This word describes both an article of military dress and a condition to which its wearers quickly become habituated.
Finance: A lucrative profession concerned with creating bogus profits and paper loses by buying and selling things that do not exist in the real world.
Florida: Retirees, rednecks, and a swamp, coated with Disney to attract grandchildren. The swamp is worth seeing.
Food: Humanity's partner in a long term relationship that only recently became unhealthy, tending alternately toward abuse and neglect.
Fraud: Robbing a bank with a toy gun.
Freedom: In theory, the right to select the objects and activities which one likes the most; in practice, the privilege of selecting the actions and possessions which one dislikes the least.
Freedom of Speech: A liberty which everyone agrees is an absolute necessity to maintain a decent civilization--until they hear words with which they disagree.
French: A language in which profanity sounds like poetry. It's still grittier than its inventors.
German: A language in which poetry sounds like profanity, spoken by the ancestral enemies of the French.
Google+: The Pepsi to Facebook's Coca-Cola...or perhaps the Shasta Cola to Facebook's Coca-Cola.
Government: An extraordinarily unpopular professional association of people whose careers are centrally concerned with winning popularity contests.
Heavy Metal: A genre of rock music. Its performers are easily distinguished by their steadfast refusal to engage in any healthful behavior other than weight-bearing exercise.
History: The study of our ancestors' virtues and other people's misery.
Human Nature: Things that people do because they want to.
Ignorance: A product of, and requirement for, politics. The system doesn't work if voters know enough to disbelieve both sides.
Insanity: The inability to think as prescribed by modern human culture. See also: Insight.
Insight: Thinking proscribed by modern human culture. See also: Insanity.
Introvert: A person for whom social activity and the lack thereof are equally unhealthy.
Job Opening: A phrase always accompanied by "experience required" or "experience preferred."
Lawn Care: A paradoxical pursuit in which people attempt simultaneously to husband and halt the growth of plants on their property. Lawn care, as most labor-intensive activities in our society, it is done almost entirely for the sake of appearances.
Lawyer: Someone who knows six different ways of saying things he may not mean and probably doesn't believe.
Life: An awkward situation; Something that is just passing through water; Something that is bad for you, but better than the alternatives; A series of bad jokes, punctuated by emotional outbursts.
Living: An activity best done by the odd, the talented, the poetic, and the sarcastic.
Lost Wages: An economist's word for recovered time.
Majority: More than half of the people. If you find yourself agreeing with them, it's time to reexamine your beliefs.
Man: A type of person who is frequently deceived by appearances.
Materialism: The dominant ethical system in the United States. Materialism, as a moral philosophy, holds that people can be judged, and their value appraised, based upon their possessions rather than their actions, aptitudes, or nature as human beings.
Mind: A non-Newtonian fluid, the mind parts easily for influence but quickly hardens against change.
Misery: That which is only amusing in hindsight.
Money: A convenient invention, for which we perpetually inconvenience ourselves.
Mosquito: In the global North, the third or fourth most irritating feature of the summer season; in the global South, a merciless mass-murderer with a taste for fruit.
Myspace: An archaic precursor to Facebook.
Nonconformity: A social inconvenience achieved at great personal inconvenience.
Obesity: An unshakable personal faith in the theory that too much of a good thing is a good thing, accompanied by the willingness to test that theory in practice.
Oxygen: A reactive element often found in diatomic molecules in a gaseous state. Water is also nearly 90% oxygen by weight. Those who say "love conquers all" or "all you need is love" are guilty of underrating oxygen.
Peace: A temporary period of no fighting, enforced by superior strength.
People's Republic: A place where neither the people nor their votes have any power.
Plan: A detailed articulation of one thing you can be certain isn't going to happen.
Poet: Someone who thinks in metaphor and speaks in riddles.
Polar Bear: One of the two animals known to science that becomes increasingly tan as temperatures rise.
Political Machine: An aparatus that produces fruit for its operators, grist for historians, and misery for everyone else. Only two such machines, located on Capitol and First streets in Washington, DC, are still in operation.
Political Party: In theory, a group of like-minded people pooling their resources and influence in order to achieve policy goals. In practice, either a self-perpetuating entity that seeks only to increase its own power, or a group of like-minded but ultimately irrelevant people pooling their resources and lack of influence in order to fail to achieve policy goals. The names of political parties are sometimes used as pejoratives, which is evidence that people sometimes have the right idea about them.
Politician: A person with a miraculous gift for determining what ought and ought not to be done. If two or more politicians are found to agree upon any given course of action, you can be certain that it is a terrible idea.
Principle of Occam's Razor, The: The science of saving money on medicine and medical care by dismissing all physical ailments as "old football injury" and "something I ate."
Progress: The story of privileges being gradually turned into rights.
Pundit: A furnace that thinks itself a prophet.
Rebellion: An act of deliberate, directed nonconformity. It is most often achieved by conforming zealously to the standards and mores of some other group against whom the rebel is not currently rebelling.
Republic: A system of government in which a populace selects its leaders on the basis of whose lies it prefers.
Research: God's punishment for the sins of the researcher. They must be exceptional sinners.
Sarcasm: Sarcasm? Like anyone uses that anymore!
Science: A field of study largely concerned with doing interesting and unusual things in the most precise and tedious manner possible.
Science Fiction: A pleasure and a paradox.
Sibling: See: Scapegoat, Punching Bag.
Smell: A sense which, in animals, is useful for perceiving the outside world, and which, in humans, produces little utility and much complaint.
Talent: The ability to do the unusual, regularly.
Tasty Steaks: The inverse situation of sour grapes, in which you are the recipient of that which someone else pursued or desired.
Technology: That which is rendered popular by newness until time and improvement render it more useful than its predecessor, at which point it becomes unfashionable.
Television: A modern substitute for babysitters, schoolteachers, stages, concert halls, church, and human contact.
Time: A perpetually-undervalued, non-renewable resource.
TL;DR: An abbreviation which modern culture has invented to serve as a concise and hasty declaration that my ignorance is superior to your knowledge.
Travel: A leisurely form of relaxation--at least among those able to sleep on an airplane.
Trending: An adjective that denotes a thing nearing the end of its fifteen minutes of fame.
Vegetarianism: Religious self-flagellation in India and a fad diet in the west. The weight-loss strategy behind Vegetarianism is that if you make eating an unpleasant experience you won't do it as much. Veganism, the most extreme variety of Vegetarianism, is actually aversion therapy for food.
Vigilance: Widely believed to be the price of liberty. As frequently the case with conventional wisdom, that belief is categorically incorrect. The true price of liberty is a willingness to abide those with which one disagrees, and all empirical evidence suggests that none yet live who are willing and able to pay it.
Violence: America's Pastime.
Wealth: An object of worship. It serves as the monotheistic god of the world's largest religion.
Wireless Internet: A novel form of infectious contagion.
Writer: One whose self-assigned role is to resolve the dissonance between what authority told us and what experience tells us. See also: Artist.
X: Reputable words do not begin with the letter X, which is reserved for brand names (Xanax), children's toys (xylophone), and dead brown people from the age of antiquity (Xerxes).
Youth: A state of flexibility. The muscles and credulity of the young are much more difficult to strain than those of the old, the latter tending to respond at the slightest provocation.
Z: Reputable words to not begin with the letter Z, which is reserved for brand names (Zoloft), children's toys (zoetrope), and fictional white people from the age of antiquity (Zeus).
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